Pavel Talankin, who filmed how a Russian school tried to justify the country’s war in Ukraine to its students in a clandestine project for the Oscar-winning Mr Nobody Against Putin, is guilty of treachery, his former teacher has told Russian state TV.
The documentary, by Talankin and David Borenstein, was based on two years of footage that Talankin recorded at a school where he was employed in the Chelyabinsk region, some 1,500km southeast of Moscow.
Banned by the Russian authorities, the documentary shows how the school changed after Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine in 2022 and how some of the teachers — via history lessons and activities such as newly introduced patriotic hours — justified the war and sought to instil patriotism in the pupils.
Talankin, who fled Russia in 2024, has said it was important to tell the world how Russian schoolchildren were being indoctrinated. He has defended the film as a record for posterity, showing how “an entire generation became angry and aggressive”.
But in an interview with TV programme Vesti, Nina Zabugornova — who the broadcaster described as Talankin’s first teacher in his hometown of Karabash — said he was an ordinary boy not different from others.
“I wanted to watch the documentary, to see what Pashka filmed,” said Zabugornova, standing in front of an Orthodox church in Karabash, where she is a bell-ringer.
“But it turned out that Pashka had decided to turn his back on his motherland. Isn’t that a betrayal? Isn’t that an evil?”
In March Russia designated Talankin, who fled the country in 2024, as a foreign agent. Those given the label are subject to exacting bureaucratic requirements.
Zabugornova, who said she had been a teacher for four decades, blamed herself for Talankin’s having committed “a betrayal”.
“So I think that when he was little, when all these things were being formed in him, I must have overlooked something somewhere, didn’t give him enough good lessons,” she told Vesti.
Reuters
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